"Erudition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Christianity proposes to establish the boundaries of that great tide of Christianity through all the ages, and for all parts of the globe. An undertaking worthy of the Benedictine learning, worthy of such a prodigy of erudition ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... classical author; and he has prefixed to it a chronological abridgment of sacred and profane history connected, from the beginning of the world, which, though not critically adapted to his main design, is of far more intrinsic value, and indeed displays a vast fund of historical erudition. On the whole, though this father of the English learning seems to have been but a genius of the middle class, neither elevated nor subtile, and one who wrote in a low style, simple, but not elegant, yet, when we reflect upon the time in which he lived, the place in which ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... been ascertained, it was desirable to fix his calling, and, despite his disclaimer of inherited erudition, several circumstances bespoke him a schoolmaster, even before the question seemed settled by the first act of his convalescence being an inquiry into the amount of book-learning which Dan and Nicholas had amassed during their sixteen ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... man. Socrates had taught men to regard their own nature as the great object of investigation; and this lesson Epicurus willingly gave ear to.—But man does not interrogate his own nature out of simple curiosity, or simple erudition; he studies his nature in order that he may improve it; he learns the extent of his capacities, in order that he may properly direct them. The aim, therefore, of all such ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... profession I was interested in the designing of fonts and baptisteries, and by a natural process I was led to investigate the history of baptism; and some of the arguments I then learnt up still remain with me. That's the simple explanation of my erudition.' ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... Heaven it hath not pleased on thee Deep erudition to bestow, Or black Latino's gift of tongues, No Latin let thy pages show. Ape not philosophy or wit, Lest one who cannot comprehend, Make a wry face at thee and ask, "Why offer flowers to ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... part of Faust, is a philosophy of literature set in poetry; the work of one who found himself the master of histories, mythologies, philosophies, sciences, and national literatures, in the encyclopaedical manner in which modern erudition, with its international intercourse of the whole earth's population, researches into Indian, Etruscan, and all Cyclopaean arts, geology, chemistry, astronomy; and every one of these kingdoms assuming a certain aerial and poetic ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... entirely inadequate or incorrect general standards of taste and criticism will have been arrived at. It is worth remembering that at least one eminently competent English critic has declared that while there may be less erudition in America, there ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... As a great gallery should represent all phases of art through their several stages of progress and decay, meeting all wants and tastes, so criticism should be based upon a foundation equally broad,—not proud of its erudition nor dictatorial, but with due humility uttering its opinions, prompt to sustain them, and yet ever ready to listen ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... into the belief that all human erudition was collected in our pedagogue, whose green spectacles and solemn phiz as he passed to his little schoolhouse amid a waste of sand might have gained him a diploma from any college in New England. In truth, I dreaded ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... are, I have borrowed them from a dissertation by the Abbe de Fontenu[15], a copy of whose engraving of the place I insert. Indebted as I am to him for his hints, I can, however, by no means subscribe to his reasoning, by which he labors with great erudition to prove that, neither the popular tradition which ascribes this camp to Caesar, nor its name, evidently Roman, nor some coins and medals of the same nation that have been found here, are at all evidences of its Latin origin; but that, as we have ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... why, less glad to see this Professor Willows than Miss Appleby seemed. His long black coat and black tie were fairly proper for a man of erudition; but his hat was soft and broad of brim, and his trousers were of brown corduroy, drawn over ...
— How Doth the Simple Spelling Bee • Owen Wister
... history of modern science. No previous writer has treated the subject from this point of view, and the present monograph will be found to possess no less originality of conception than vigor of reasoning and wealth of erudition."—New York Tribune. ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... perhaps camps, at lowest cities and inns; knew in a manner, practically and theoretically, all things, and had published multifarious Books of his own. [List of them, Twenty-one in number, mostly on learned Antiquarian subjects,—in Forster, ii. 255, 256.] The sublime long-eared erudition of the man was not to be contested; manifest to everybody; thrice and four times manifest to himself, in the ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... very soon became distinguished patrons of learning. It has been said that they overran the domains of science as quickly as they overran the realms of their neighbours. It became customary for the first dignities of the state to be held by men distinguished for their erudition. Some of the maxims current show how much literature was esteemed. "The ink of the doctor is equally valuable with the blood of the martyr." "Paradise is as much for him who has rightly used the pen as for him who has fallen by the sword." "The world is sustained by four things only: the ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... puris naturalibus—which means, in its native—or more properly—but which comes to the same thing—in its naked state; and, in the mane time, I propose the health of one of my best benefactors—Gerald Cavanagh, whose hospitable roof is a home—a domicilium to erudition and respectability, when they happen, as they ought, to be legitimately concatenated in the same person—as they are in your humble servant; and I also beg leave to add the pride of the barony, his fair and virtuous daughter, Kathleen, in conjunction wid the ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... line between true and false science, however, had not yet been drawn. The age was pedantic, and appealed too much to the authority of antiquity. Hence we have such monuments of perverse and curious erudition as Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621; and Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Inquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors, 1646. The former of these was the work of an Oxford scholar, an astrologer, who cast his own horoscope, and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... in the universities of Scotland cannot be expected to be often decorated with the splendours of ornamental erudition, but they obtain a mediocrity of knowledge, between learning and ignorance, not inadequate to the purposes of common life, which is, I believe, very widely diffused among them, and which countenanced in general by a national ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... recreation-time in the courts. In those very days he was writing great plays, and needed all the time he could get. The horse-holding legend ought to be strangled; it too formidably increases the historian's difficulty in accounting for the young Shakespeare's erudition—an erudition which he was acquiring, hunk by hunk and chunk by chunk, every day in those strenuous times, and emptying each day's catch ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... call out Grampus again, he was mistaken. Everybody felt it too absurd that Merman should undertake to correct Grampus in matters of erudition, and an eminent man has something else to do than to refute a petty objector twice over. What was essential had been done: the public had been enabled to form a true judgment of Merman's incapacity, the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis were but subsidiary elements ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... Hawkins, with an expression that savored of erudition, "was a man who was so all fired rich that he had to hire folks to spend his money ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... will be for ever preserved, I know, under every change of fortune or of political tenets, while honour, and virtue, and religion, and friendly affection, and erudition, and the principles of a gentleman have binding force and authority upon minds so cultivated and dignified. When they fall, I am contented to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... fulfilment of a promise to a friend. Soon after my return from Europe, in November, I spent part of a day in New York discussing Bolshevism with two friends. One of these is a Russian Socialist, who has lived many years in America, a citizen of the United States, and a man whose erudition and fidelity to the working-class movement during many years have long commanded my admiration and reverence. The other friend is a native American, also a Socialist. A sincere Christian, he has identified his faith in the ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... resist the temptation that was offered. "Fancy having to read through all Punch's jokes week after week for years!" exclaimed one. "No wonder we are a hardy race. No wonder the poor man shot himself." Mr. Pincott was a man of great ability, of remarkable erudition, and extreme conscientiousness. Although his bereavement was preying on his mind, he saw the paper out, and did not commit the fatal act until he had sent his usual letter to the Editor, wherewith he would relieve himself of his week's responsibility. ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... competent as observers of development, because they have never attempted to become acquainted with it. Even so eminent a writer as the late Prof. W. B. Carpenter shows by his writings, which are a monument of laborious erudition, that he did not understand so simple a matter as the external form of the cranium belonging to the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... 307.] He wished to recite with Croke some scenes from Sophocles to his wondering court; and though, to be sure, there was no one there who understood the Greek tongue, yet all, without doubt, must be enraptured with the wonderful music of the Greek and the amazing erudition of the king. ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... pretensions of the learned, from their appeal to ancient names and their quotations in unfamiliar tongues, and from the easy fall into technicality of men struggling to be explicit where a high degree of explicitness is impossible. But it needs erudition and accumulated and alien literature to make metaphysics obscure, and some of the most fruitful and able metaphysical discussion in the world was conducted by a number of unhampered men in small Greek cities, who knew no language but ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... love of study. "At length, in order to indulge my own taste, I would rise with the sun, while they were buried in sleep, and hide myself in the woods, that I might read and study in quiet;" but they beat the bushes, and started in his burrow the future man of erudition. Sir WILLIAM JONES was rarely a partaker in the active sports of Harrow; it was said of GRAY that he was never a boy; the unhappy CHATTERTON and BURNS were singularly serious in youth;[A] as were HOBBES and BACON. MILTON has preserved ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... us by the example of the primitive Christians, and, in the manner of the age, drowns opposition in a flood of erudition, out of place, but never pedantic; futile, yet diverting; erroneous, ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... antiquity; the bumpy page crackles faintly; the big irregular print meets the eye with a pleasant and leisurely mellowness. But what do they tell one? Very little, alas! that one need know, very much which it would be a positive mistake to believe. That is the worst of erudition—that the next scholar sucks the few drops of honey that you have accumulated, sets right your blunders, and you are superseded. You have handed on the torch, perhaps, and even trimmed it. Your errors, your patient explanations, were a necessary step in the ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Thirty Years War had, as he confesses, made many people doubt the benefits of the Reformation, distrust its principles, and reject its doctrines. He discharged the thankless labor of apology in a work of enormous erudition, still valuable to the special student ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... he certainly is a scholar in another and perhaps a higher sense. I mean in range of acquirement and the flavor that comes with it." Those words might have been written of himself. It is sixty-five years since Lowell was appointed to his professorship at Harvard, and during this long period erudition has not been idle here. It is quite possible that the University possesses to-day a better Dante scholar than Lowell, a better scholar in Old French, a better Chaucer scholar, a better Shakespeare scholar. But it is certain that ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... retired to rest. The following morning his efforts were applauded with much picturesque expletive, and even criticism was evoked by a lean puncher who insisted "that the tall guy might be a good cook all right, but he sure didn't know how to spell 'calf.'" Naturally the puncher's erudition leaned ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... up enough of her companion's erudition to understand what had attracted him to the house. She noticed the fan-shaped tracery of the broken light above the door, the flutings of the paintless pilasters at the corners, and the round window set in the gable; and she knew that, for reasons that still escaped ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... part, and vivaciously commonplace. I don't know which made me feel most dreary. The predominance of my countrymen gave the dinner the gayety of a funeral; the predominance of the Mossoo gave it the fatigue of got-up enthusiasm, of trivial expansiveness. To hear strangers imparting the scraps of erudition and connoisseurship which they had that morning gathered from their valets de place and guide-books, or describing the sights they had just seen, to you, who either saw them yesterday, or would see them to-morrow, could not be permanently attractive. My mind ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... extravagantly idealized, figure of Mr. Shandy takes bodily shape and consistency before our eyes. It is a mistake, I think, of Sir Walter Scott's to regard the portrait of this eccentric philosopher as intended for a satire upon perverted and deranged erudition—as the study of a man "whom too much and too miscellaneous learning had brought within a step or two of madness." Sterne's conception seems to me a little more subtle and less commonplace than that. Mr. Shandy, I imagine, is designed to personify not ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... I was some years younger than I am at present, I used to employ myself in a more laborious diversion, which I learned from a Latin treatise of exercise, that is written with great erudition: It is there called the Skimachia, or the fighting with a man's own shadow, and consists in the brandishing of two short sticks grasped in each hand, and loaded with plugs of lead at either end. This opens the chest, exercises the limbs, and gives a man all ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... one of his fellow-dramatist, Thomas Lodge, whose Rosalynd contributed so much to the Poet's As You Like It: for it was then much the fashion for authors to prank up their matter with superfluous erudition. Like all the surviving works of Greene, Pandosto is greatly charged with learned impertinence, and in the annoyance thence resulting one is apt to overlook the real merit of the performance. It is better than Lodge's Rosalynd for this reason, if for no other, that it is shorter. I must ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... drawn large supplies. The work, though prolix, is valuable, as the author was an eye-witness of many of the facts, had others from persons who were concerned in the transactions recorded, and possessed copious documents. It displays great erudition, though somewhat crudely and diffusely introduced. His history was commenced in 1527, at fifty-three years of age, and was finished in 1559, when eighty-five. As many things are set down from memory, there is occasional inaccuracy, but the whole bears the stamp of sincerity and truth. ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... and unjust to me, by wresting and forcing my meaning, in the preface to another book, as if I condemned and exposed all learning, though they knew I declared that I greatly honoured and esteemed all men of superior literature and erudition, and that I only undervalued false or superficial learning, that signifies nothing for the service of mankind; and that as to physic, I expressly affirmed that learning must be joined with native genius to make a ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... a stretch. Of her loyalty he had had no doubt, but for the first time in his marital life the professor's profound knowledge of human nature was shot like a spot-light on to his own affairs. Yet his erudition did not in the least relieve him from the ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... two after the receipt of the books Jude had grown callous to the shabby trick played him by the dead languages. In fact, his disappointment at the nature of those tongues had, after a while, been the means of still further glorifying the erudition of Christminster. To acquire languages, departed or living in spite of such obstinacies as he now knew them inherently to possess, was a herculean performance which gradually led him on to a greater interest in it than in the presupposed ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... the most learned society on earth, for men versed in all literature and erudition, when hurried into our presence for examination, quail and stand in silent amazement. 'Placid Death' alone is coeval with this Society, and resembles it, for in its own Catalogue it equalizes rich and poor, great and small, white and black, old ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... classed him with the children of twelve or thirteen. However, as learning was considered in New Canaan a superfluous and wholly unnecessary adjunct to the means of living, Absalom's want of agility in imbibing erudition never troubled him, nor did it in the least call forth the pity or contempt of ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... of Liberty inquired, "Wouldn't you like to walk home with me, Comrade Higgins?" He stammered, "Yes"; and they went out, the young goddess plying him with questions about conditions in the jail, and displaying most convincing erudition on the subject of the economic aspects of criminology—at the same time seeming entirely oblivious to the hoverings of the other moths, and the disgust of the unemancipated ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... divination—and to all the various scraps and fragments of antiquarian history and baronial biography, which are scattered profusely through the whole narrative. These we conceive to be put in purely for the sake of displaying the erudition of the author; and poetry, which has no other recommendation, but that the substance of it has been gleaned from rare or obscure books, has, in our estimation, the least of all possible recommendations. Mr Scott's great talents, and the ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... Head Master in 1593, and spent his vacations in travelling over England collecting antiquarian information. His great work, Britannia, was pub. in 1586, and at once brought him fame both at home and abroad. It is a work of vast labour and erudition, written in elegant Latin. In 1597 C. was made Clarencieux King-at-Arms which, setting him free from his academic duties, enabled him to devote more time to his antiquarian and historical labours. His other principal works are Annals of the Reign ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... Arnold, though the titles were borrowed from Whistler. Dr. Ernest Bendz in his monograph on The Influence of Pater and Matthew Arnold in the Prose-Writings of Oscar Wilde has established this fact with curious erudition and completeness. ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... may mention That this erudition sham Is but classical pretension, The result of steady "cram.": Periphrastic methods spurning, To my readers all discerning I admit this show of learning Is ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... confused and often even perverted, and Galen's anatomy had suffered severely in the transmission. Our earliest knowledge of the teaching of medicine at Bologna is connected with a contemporary of Dante, Taddeo Alderotti, who combined Arabian erudition with the Greek spirit. He occupied a position of extraordinary prominence, was regarded as the first citizen of Bologna and a public benefactor exempt from the payment of taxes. That he should have acquired wealth is not surprising if his usual fees were at the rate ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... noting down this original narrative from his own lips, my excellent old friend informed me, with cheerfulness not unmingled with the dignified pride characteristic of erudition, and of the possession of deep and darksome lore, that he also knew the story of Samson. And thus ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... renounce his public profession of parish schoolmaster, make his constant residence at the Place, and, in consideration of a sum not quite equal to the wages of a footman even at that time, to undertake to communicate to the future Laird of Ellangowan all the erudition which he had, and all the graces and accomplishments which—he had not indeed, but which he had never discovered that he wanted. In this arrangement, the Laird found also his private advantage; securing the constant benefit of a patient auditor, to whom he told his stories when ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... eminent genius whom the Cassinesi claim as their alumni; nor, with Boccaccio's testimony to their carelessness, and with the evidence of their library before our eyes, can we rate their services to civilised erudition very highly. I longed to possess the spirit, for one moment, of Montalembert. I longed for what is called historical imagination, for the indiscriminate voracity of those men to whom world-famous sites are ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... the fashion to boast of refinement and learning, while libraries jostled each other and rhetoricians and philosophers swarmed in the city, Paulus was chiefly conscious that in the place of creative imagination a soulless erudition walked abroad. In the vestibule of the Palatine temple, waiting for the morning appearance of the Emperor, rhetoricians discussed the meaning of an adverb. In the baths they tested each other's knowledge ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... sort of speculative necessity for discovering points of resemblance between American languages, myths, and social observances and those of the Oriental world. Now the aborigines of this Continent were made out to be Kamtchatkans, and now Chinamen, and again they were shown, with quaint erudition, to be remnants of the ten tribes of Israel. Perhaps none of these theories have been exactly disproved, but they have all been superseded and laid on the shelf."[1] The tendency of modern discovery is ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... 'study;' for having earned a rushlight by running messages, or doing extra work for his neighbours, he might be found at night, as long as the light would last, poring over a book. In this way he had, unknown to others, while still a mere boy, read through that vast quarry of erudition, Henry's ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... Muller really never conies to grips with his opponents, and his large volumes shine rather in erudition and style than in method and system. Anyone who attempts a reply must necessarily follow Mr. Max Muller up and down, collecting his scattered remarks on this or that point at issue. Hence my reply, ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... dark trees, and mirrored in the lake so clearly that, gazing long at the reflection, one felt as if standing on one's head. I pointed it out to the Boy from a distance, on its jutting promontory, with the pride of the well-informed guide, and talked of the place with a superficial appearance of erudition. But after all, when he came to pin me down with questions, my bubble-reputation burst. Not a date could I pump up from the drained depths of my recollection, and in the end I had to accept ignominiously from the Boy such crumbs as he had collected from a guide-book larder. What was ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... another task, that of fixing the letters of the consonantal text of the Bible (by the Massora), its vowel pronunciation (by the punctuation), and its translation into the Aramaic vernacular (Targum). Here also the Babylonians came after the Palestinians, yet of this sort of erudition Palestine continued to be the headquarters even ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... chronological system can best repair what is deficient, and best elucidate what is obscure in the scanty authorities bequeathed to us, all the light of a profound and disciplined intellect, applying the acutest comprehension to the richest erudition, and arriving at its conclusions according to the true spirit of inductive reasoning, which proportions the completeness of the final discovery to the caution of the intermediate process. My obligations to that learning and to those gifts which ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... pretending to be so, which did quite as well, languidly exclaiming at evening parties, that if she could have known Cicero, she thought she could have died contented. We had Mr. Feeder, clipped to the stubble, grinding out his classic stops like a barrel-organ of erudition. Above all, we had Toots, the head boy, or rather "the head and shoulder boy," he was so much taller than the rest! Of whom in that intellectual forcing-house (where he had "gone through" everything so completely, that one day he "suddenly left off blowing, and remained in the establishment ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... those who stand aloof from the field of strife. We had been happy in securing good places, and had nothing to complain of but the immediate vicinity of an amateur, or aficionado, who kept his tongue in continual motion, and favored his neighbors with a tremendous display of erudition ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... younger Rudbeck,[91] in 1733, and Celsius,[92] in 1745, have displayed much erudition and research in their inquiries; but the first of these writers arrived at the conclusion that nothing certain could be come to on the subject; while the second proposed raspberries as the Dudaïm; and the third maintained that they were the fruit of the Zizyphus, ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... learning," says he, "now tending to extinction, (which may God avert!) I hold for my own part, to be this:—that the younger children are not well grounded in the minor schools. Foundations ought to be laid there, which might afterwards support the whole weight of solid learning and true erudition. The children ought to learn from genuine authors the Greek and Latin languages; the Keys (as they are) of those treasures which preceding ages have laid up for our use. And they ought so to learn, as to be able to appreciate the thoughts of others (specially of the best authors), ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... Thucydides, who more than any one of his epoch advanced the movement of Greek and Latin learning, which, whilst it had the effect of arresting the development of Italian literature, enriched Europe by opening up to it the sources of ancient erudition, of philosophy, poetry, and literary taste. Towards the year 1435 he drifted to the court of Alfonso of Aragon, whose secretary he ultimately became. Some years later he attacked the Temporal Power and urged the secularization of the ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... serious acquisitions, the bulk of his library: solid and expensive works—historians, archaeologists, travellers, with noble volumes of engravings, and unwieldy tomes of antique lore. Little enough of all this had Rolfe digested, but more and more he loved to have erudition within his reach. He began to lack room for comely storage; already a large bookcase had intruded into his bedroom. If he continued to purchase, he must needs house himself more amply; yet he dreaded ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... the private history of nations: That the great story-tellers, Aesop, Lucian, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, La Fontaine, Lesage, Sterne, Voltaire, Walter Scott, the unknown Arabians of the Thousand and One Nights, were all men of genius as well as giants of erudition. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... established by the revolution of 1860, came into power to set all these acts of negligence and roguery to rights. Signor Fiorelli, who is all intelligence and activity, not to mention his erudition, which numerous writings prove, was appointed inspector of the excavations. Under his administration, the works which had been vigorously resumed were pushed on by as many as seven hundred laborers ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... to a few cases. Let me see. There was 'The Dead Alive,' a capital thing!—the record of a gentleman's sensations when entombed before the breath was out of his body—full of tastes, terror, sentiment, metaphysics, and erudition. You would have sworn that the writer had been born and brought up in a coffin. Then we had the 'Confessions of an Opium-eater'—fine, very fine!—glorious imagination—deep philosophy acute speculation—plenty ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... is an old crofter who, in his early years, worked at the loom with Alexander Bain, late Professor in the University of Aberdeen. Half a century ago, John Stuart Mill said that Bain's erudition was encyclopaedic. From long residence in France, I know that few British philosophers are better known than Bain (whose name the French amusingly pronounce to rhyme with vin). This old crofter tells how he used to chaff the future professor for invariably having a book in ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... it had even a larger sale. Scott himself regarded it as superior to both; but an author is not always the best judge of his own productions, and we do not accept his criticism. It probably cost him more labor; but it is an exhibition of his erudition rather than a revelation of himself or of Nature. It is certainly very learned; but learning does not make a book popular, nor is a work of fiction the place for a display of learning. If "The Antiquary" were published in these times, it would be pronounced pedantic. Readers ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... there is something flattering in this simple faith in my accomplishment as a linguist and my erudition as a philosopher. But I cannot tolerate the assumption that life and literature is so poor in these islands that we must go abroad for all dramatic material that is not common and all ideas that are not superficial. I therefore venture to put my critics in possession ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... Count, to our revels," said one of the gentlemen, who appeared to be the president. "But ours is a feast of reason and the flow of soul, and we are met here to discuss works of art, to hear read the practical effusions of our members, and to enjoy the society of men of intellect and erudition." ...
— Voyages and Travels of Count Funnibos and Baron Stilkin • William H. G. Kingston
... that everything has been divinely revealed to us. I know nothing more unbearable than the complacent type of scientist who knows very exactly all that he does know, but has not imagination enough to understand what a speck his little accumulation of doubtful erudition is when compared with the immensity of our ignorance. He is the person who thinks that the universe can be explained by laws, as if a law did not require construction as well as a world! The motion of the engine can be explained ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... with the life of Saint Dodekanus the Italian had displayed more than his usual erudition and acumen. He had sifted the records with such incredible diligence that little was left for the pen of an annotator, save words of praise. In two small matters, however, the Englishman, considerably to his regret, was enabled or rather obliged ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... instinctively wanders on optatives, choriambi, and that happy conjecture of Smelfungus in the antistrophe.'[100] But certain books having to be got up for an examination by the cramming process, the receptacle for all this erudition only looks forward to the time when he may throw his Classics behind the fire for ever. No book with the least pretention to permanent value can be read purely by and for itself; inevitably it must draw on the reader—if he be in any sense worthy of the name—from point to point beyond its own ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... Epigrams of Catullus, Martial, and Ausonius, of some Satires of Horace and Juvenal, and several other Pieces of Ancient and Modern Authors, which are read and commented upon; and about which even celebrated Jesuits and other religious Persons, as eminent for their Piety as their Erudition, have employed their Studies. Yet who has condemn'd or complain'd of them? We must confess, such Things should be managed with Address; and those of them who have meddled with any of the Authors I have named, have shewn that it may be ...
— The Lovers Assistant, or, New Art of Love • Henry Fielding
... before coming quite up. If so, it was a fortunate accident, for it served as the tiny fulcrum on which to place the point of that mighty lever which was destined ere long to raise him to the pinnacle of canine erudition. Dick Varley immediately lavished upon him the tenderest caresses and gave him a lump of meat. But he quickly tried it again lest he should lose the lesson. The dog evidently felt that if he did not fetch that mitten he should have no meat or caresses. In order, however, to ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... Jacques—who goes everywhere with Jane Zeld," answered the ever-present reporter, delighted to have an opportunity of displaying his erudition. "He is ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... it if you like." So from that time forth John always addressed me as "Professor," and from hearing him constantly using the term, M'Allister soon acquired the same habit. I am afraid they both credited me with rather more erudition than I really possessed; but although I should never attempt to talk at large on matters with which I was not fully acquainted, I have lived long enough to know that it is not always wise to go very ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... had been picked up by a passing steamer, he gave over the last vestige of apprehension concerning her welfare, and devoted his giant intellect solely to the consideration of those momentous and abstruse scientific problems which he considered the only proper food for thought in one of his erudition. His mind appeared blank to the influence ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... suffer in my hands, for his lordship had long been in the habit of considering me as one of the discreetest men in the burgh; and although he returned very civil answers to all letters, he wrote to me in the cordial erudition of an old friend—a thing which the volunteers soon discerned, and ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... a warm friendship. He delighted in the galleries and scenery of Florence, though with Rome he was less impressed. "But for some beautiful palaces," he said, "it might just as well be any town in Germany." In an interview with Pope Gregory XVI, he took the opportunity of displaying his erudition. When the Pope observed that the Greeks had taken their art from the Etruscans, Albert replied that, on the contrary, in his opinion, they had borrowed from the Egyptians: his Holiness politely acquiesced. Wherever ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... taste, industry, and appropriate erudition we owe, I will not say the best, (for that would be saying little,) but a good, edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, has complimented the Philaster, which he himself describes as inferior to the Maid's Tragedy by the same writers, as but little below the noblest of Shakspeare's plays, Lear, ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... index, and analyzed its secretions and tested it for indecan. He knew trance and clairvoyance, auto-suggestion and telepathic hallucination, epilepsy and hysteria and ecstasy; and over the head of any disputatious person he would swing the steam-shovel of his erudition, and bury the unfortunate beneath a wagon-load of Latin and ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... was invited by Zuone Mocenigo of Venice to teach him the higher and secret learning. The Venetian supposed that Bruno, with more than human erudition, possessed the art of conveying knowledge into the heads of dullards. Disappointed in this expectation, he quarreled with his teacher, and in a spirit of revenge picked out of Bruno's writings a mass of testimony sufficient to convict him of heresy. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... that swarms of literary blow flies will pounce upon the errors with delight, and, buzzing with the ecstasy of infernal joy, endeavour to hum their readers into a belief of the profundity of their critic erudition;—I shall nevertheless, with Churchill, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... catalogue" of victims to the BIBLIOMANIA! The first eminent character who appears to have been infected with this disease was RICHARD DE BURY, one of the tutors of Edward III., and afterwards Bishop of Durham; a man who has been uniformly praised for the variety of his erudition, and the intenseness of his ardour in book-collecting.[18] I discover no other notorious example of the fatality of the BIBLIOMANIA until the time of Henry VII.; when the monarch himself may be considered as having ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... SALA, who was chiefly influential in introducing Hans Breitmann to the English public, and who has ever been his warmest friend. Another friend who encouraged and aided me by criticism was the late OCTAVE DELEPIERRE, a man of immense erudition, especially in archæology, curiosa and facetiæ. I trust that I may be pardoned for here mentioning that he often spoke of Breitmann's "Interview with the Pope" as his favorite Macaronic poem, which, as he had published two volumes of Macaronea, was praise indeed. His theory was, ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... was in the world of spirits, it shone as a bright star; but when it descended into the natural world, the light disappeared, and it was darkened in the degree to which it fell: and while it was let down by the angels in companies consisting of men of learning and erudition, both clergy and laity, there was heard a murmur from many, in which were these expressions, "What have we here? Is it any thing or nothing? What matters it whether we know these things or not? Are they not mere creatures ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... how prone we are to judge the ancients wrongly: the exaggerated sense of literature, for example, or, as Wolf, when speaking of the "inner history of ancient erudition," calls it, "the history ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... blandishments of flattery nor the frosts of discouragement to hinder his progress; but, impressing his great personality upon all with whom he came in contact, he moved steadily forward, and is now one of the best examples of erudition, eloquence and ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... remarkable lines in which an old bard, doubtless seeing the Menai Bridge by means of second sight, says: 'I will pass to the land of Mona notwithstanding the waters of Menai, without waiting for the ebb'—and was feeling not a little proud of my erudition when the man in grey, after looking at me for a moment fixedly, asked me the name of the bard who composed them—'Sion ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... "That he could hardly consider a prose Tragedy as dramatic; that it was difficult for the Performers to speak it; that let it be either in the middling or in low life, it may, though in metre and spirited, be properly familiar and colloquial; that, many in the middling rank are not without erudition; that they have the feelings and sensations of nature, and every emotion in consequence thereof, as well as the great, and that even the lowest, when impassioned, raise their language; that the writing of prose is generally the plea and excuse of poverty ...
— The Female Gamester • Gorges Edmond Howard
... Poetae," the "Literary Remains," and on the margins of countless books, contain the most fundamental criticism of literature that has ever been attempted, fragmentary as the attempt remains. "There is not a man in England," said Coleridge, with truth, "whose thoughts, images, words, and erudition have been published in larger quantities than mine; though I must admit, not by, nor for, myself." He claimed, and rightly, as his invention, a "science of reasoning and judging concerning the productions of literature, the characters and measures of public ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... has something charming about it, and entertains the eye, satiated with chefs d'oeuvre. It has invention, fancy, originality; and tho I may be censured for the opinion, I confess I prefer this exuberance to the coldness of the Greek style imitated with more erudition than success in our modern public buildings. At each side stand great bronze horses pawing the ground, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... into any villanous shape. My virtuous theories and comprehensive erudition would not have saved me from the basest of crimes. Luckily for me, I was, for the present, exempted from temptation. I had formed an acquaintance with a young American captain. On being partially informed of my situation, he invited me to embark with him for his own country. ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... remained shut up in his pantry. Ginger used to go there to smoke; and when the door stood ajar Esther saw his narrow person seated on the edge of the table, his leg swinging. Among the pantry people Mr. Leopold's erudition was a constant subject of admiration. His reminiscences of the races of thirty years ago were full of interest; he had seen the great horses whose names live in the stud-book, the horses the Gaffer had owned, had trained, had ridden, and he was full of anecdote ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... the savant in the mind of the altogether unlettered is in great measure rated in terms of intimacy with the occult forces. So, for instance, as a typical case, even so late as the middle of this century, the Norwegian peasants have instinctively formulated their sense of the superior erudition of such doctors of divinity as Luther, Malanchthon, Peder Dass, and even so late a scholar in divinity as Grundtvig, in terms of the Black Art. These, together with a very comprehensive list of minor celebrities, both living ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... Probst Caspar Goede. The magistracy of that place applied to the clergy of Berlin to recommend a suitable man to them for the office. Paul Gerhardt was their unanimous choice. They recommended him as an honourable, estimable, and learned man, whose diligence and erudition were known, of good parts and incorrupt doctrine, of a peace-loving disposition and blameless Christian life, which qualities had procured for him the love of all classes, high and low, in Berlin. They furthermore added that he had frequently, at their friendly invitation, ...
— Paul Gerhardt's Spiritual Songs - Translated by John Kelly • Paul Gerhardt
... a gallant, high-spirited boy. A letter is extant from him to Wolsey, written when he was nine years old, begging the cardinal to intercede with the king, "for an harness to exercise myself in arms according to my erudition in the Commentaries of Caesar."—Ibid. ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... the streamlets flow, That widen in their course. Hero and sage arise to show Science the mighty source, And laud the land whose talents rock The cradle of her power, And wreaths are twined round Plymouth Rock, From erudition's bower. ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... the matter of teaching itself. They have studied the subject matter with which they are to deal. They have become proficient so far as knowledge is concerned. No fault can be found with them touching the matter of erudition. But they have not given any reflective thought to the art of teaching. They have not made a study of the human mind in its development in order to know how it receives knowledge as mental nourishment, and to understand the assimilative ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... to go to work to teach a child its letters, or to open its young mind and heart to the reception of truth, whose school-rooms are places where the young mind and heart are in a state, either of perpetual torpor, or of perpetual nightmare, have these bunglers no analogues in the men of ponderous erudition that sometimes fill the Professor's chair? Have we no examples, in our highest seminaries of learning, of men very eminent in scientific attainments, who have not in themselves the first elements of a teacher? who impart to their students no quickening ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... mystic ladder in the patriarch's dream. Its base rests on the primaeval earth—its crest is lost in the shadowy splendour of the empyrean; while the great authors, who for traditionary ages have held the chain of science and philosophy, of poesy and erudition, are the angels ascending and descending the sacred scale, and maintaining, as it were, the communication between man and heaven. This feeling is so universal that there is no combination of society in any age in which ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... weeping eyes, or to her apparitions talking patois, as that of La Valette, and to a hundred things in the Church, cautiously passed over sub silentio in the last century, but now joyously proclaimed and sustained with defiant erudition by English and German doctores graces, and by the Parisian "Univers," which, openly rejoicing in the English blood spilt by the Sepoys,—for it is but Protestant blood, and that of hateful freemen,—heralds the second or third advent of universal love and Papacy. It is in our age ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... recollected distinctly that upon the Sunday before his accident, they had talked at lunch of Julian the Apostate, and Mrs. Cricklander had turned the conversation, and then had referred to the subject again at dinner with an astonishing array of facts, surprising him by her erudition. ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... Where did he get it from? How on earth did the plays get themselves written? Where, when, and how did the author pick up his multifarious learnings? Lord Penzance, good, honest man, is simply staggered by the extent of the play-wright's information. The plays, so he says, 'teem with erudition,' and can only have been written by someone who had the classics at his finger-ends, modern languages on the tip of his tongue—by someone who had travelled far and read deeply; and, above all, by a man who had spent at least a ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... attainments, and especially those who taught philosophy; in consequence of which an abundance of pretenders to learning of this sort resorted to the palace from all quarters, men who wore their palliums and were more conspicuous for their costume than for their erudition. These impostors, who invariably adopted the religious sentiments of their prince, were inimical to the welfare of the Christians; but since Julian himself was overcome by excessive vanity he derided all his predecessors in ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... this,—including the Lebanon district, Palestine proper, the country east of the Jordan, and the Sinaitic Peninsula,—RITTER devotes a space equal to 6000 pages of the size employed in Messrs Clark's publications. To translate a mass so voluminous as this would be evidently impracticable; and yet the immense erudition and power of graphic description of Professor RITTER, conjoined with the fact that he brought to the study of the Holy Land, not the unbelief of a rationalist, but living faith of a genuine Christian, has convinced the publishers that a ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... not really concerned at this time of day with the improbabilities of so well-established a tragedy, but only with the most recent interpretation of it. And let me say at once that, for the best of reasons, I do not propose to compete with the erudition of my fellow-critics in the matter of previous interpreters, for I bring a virgin mind to my consideration of the merits ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 10, 1920 • Various
... parish, amongst whom were the families of two or three farmers of substance, while the village and its neighbourhood contributed a portion of the poorest of the inhabitants. A year or two before I came, their minister died, and they had chosen another, a very worthy man, of considerable erudition, but of extreme views, as I heard, upon insignificant points, and moved by a great dislike to national churches and episcopacy. This, I say, is what I had made out about him from what I had heard; and my reader will very probably be inclined to ask, ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... Race. The Novels by Eminent Hands are all good: they are much more than parodies; they are real criticism, sound, wise, genial, and instructive. Nor are they in the least unfair. If the balderdash and cheap erudition of Bulwer and Disraeli are covered with inextinguishable mirth, no one is offended by the pleasant imitations of ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... neglected; but it was not till the writings of Bembo furnished a new code of criticism in the Italian language that they began to study it with the same minuteness as modern Latin.'' "They were encouragers of a numismatic and lapidary erudition, elegant in itself, and throwing for ever little specks of light on the still ocean of the past, but not very favourable to comprehensive observation, and tending to bestow on an unprofitable pedantry the honours ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... with the bare titles of the books which are known to have issued from the Irish monasteries, of which but a few fragments remain; and no sensible man who has read his book can affect to despise establishments which could produce so many proofs of fancy, intellect, and erudition. The scattered fragments of that rich literature, which had escaped the fury of the Scandinavian, the ignorance and rapacity of the early Anglo- Norman, the blind fanaticism of the Puritan, could still in the seventeenth century furnish materials enough for the immense compilations ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... contents of the libraries. There were then no short cuts of learning, no comprehensive lexicons, no dictionaries of antiquities, no carefully prepared thesauri of mythology and history. Each student had to hold in his brain the whole mass of classical erudition. The text and the canon of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the tragedians had to be decided. Greek type had to be struck. Florence, Venice, Basel, and Paris groaned with printing-presses. The Aldi, the Stephani, and Froben toiled by night and day, employing scores of scholars, men of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... edition of the Lives, which Dr. Birkbeck Hill prepared for publication before his death, and which has been issued by the Clarendon Press, with a brief Memoir of the editor, would probably have astonished Dr. Johnson. But, though the elaborate erudition of the notes and appendices might have surprised him, it would not have put him to shame. One can imagine his growling scorn of the scientific conscientiousness of the present day. And indeed, the three tomes of Dr. Hill's edition, with ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... Rienzi, the later emperors, and what occurred in their reign in Jerusalem and Constantinople, pass emphatically before us in the stately pages which once charmed readers of English as the model of historic eloquence, and now excite the admiration of scholars as a monument of erudition and elaborate but artificial writing. There was a new attraction in the pleasing style of Robertson and the characterization of Hume; the winsome language of the one and the transparent diction of the other made historical ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... Lord Lyttelton:—"He had attained to so eminent a degree of knowledge in mathematics, philosophy, languages, and in every branch of useful and polite learning, as few have acquired in a long life wholly devoted to study; yet to this erudition he joined, what can rarely be found with it, great talents for business, great propriety of behaviour, great politeness of manners: his eloquence was sweet, correct and flowing; his memory vast and exact; his judgment strong and acute." On visiting ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... of the next abbot devolved upon the king, and Martin de Vecti was chosen by him to govern the monastery, in 1133. The monks received him with every expression of respect, as he was reported to be a man of profound erudition and good moral character. He began his rule by forwarding the erection of the new monastery, and it was during his abbacy that it was completed and re-dedicated—which latter ceremony was conducted with great pomp, and all the abbots of the neighbouring monasteries, ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... uncomplainingly—the torture, the rack, the auto-da-fe—and yet they bowed their heads in submission to the will of Adonai. To-day they stand upright and united, as in olden times. They have gained the victory over the false disciples of the Nazarene, who, in days gone by, forgot their erudition, their medical knowledge, their commercial activity, and general culture. Pre-eminent in wealth and learning, they are found on the lecture-platform, in the fields of literature and science, in the councils of rulers, on the exchange, in the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... following work to the public, I venture to do so under your auspices, if not under the sanction of your name. And I embrace the present occasion, Rev. Sir, to bear willing testimony to your acknowledged scholarship,—your profound erudition, especially in Natural Science and Philology. I do also cheerfully and joyfully recognise you as a public witness; and at the present time of general defection, as an official and consistent witness in the British Isles for the integrity of our Covenanted Reformation,—that ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... however, be noticed. Spinoza, in the seventeenth century, and Lessing, in the eighteenth, were men far in advance of their age. They are the fathers of modern historical criticism; and to Lessing in particular, with his enormous erudition and incomparable sagacity, belongs the honour of initiating that method of inquiry which, in the hands of the so-called Tubingen School, has led to such striking and valuable conclusions concerning, the age and character of all the New Testament literature. But it was long before any ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... on his arrival in London, (said he) was waited on by a Spanish Ambassador, a man of some erudition, but who had strangely incorporated with his learning, a whimsical notion, that every country ought to have a school, in which a certain order of men should be taught to interpret signs; and that the most expert in this department ought to be dignified with the title of Professor of Signs. ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... part ignore me completely, even as they ignore each other, or notice me only to begin a clamorous exhibition of their distinctive skill. The erudite for the most part are rapt in an impervious and apoplectic complacency, from which only a denial of their erudition can rouse them. Usually they are led about by little watchers and attendants, and often there are small and active-looking creatures, small females usually, that I am inclined to think are a sort of wife to them; but some of the profounder scholars are altogether too great for ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... from whom you take your own; there is always that most terrible reader, the reader of one book, who knows that very author, and will the more indecently hasten to bring you to the bar because he knows no other, and wishes to display his erudition. A man may escape for centuries and yet be found out. In the notorious case of William Shakespeare the offender seemed finally secure of his prey; and yet one poor lady, who ended in a lunatic asylum, was able to detect ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... study on some theme furnished by the bishopric, some question of dogma, morality or religious history, which he reads aloud and discusses with his brethren under the presidency and direction of the oldest cure, who gives his final decision; this keeps theoretical knowledge and ecclesiastical erudition fresh in the minds of both reader and hearers. The other institution, almost universal nowadays, is the annual retreat which the priests in the diocese pass in the large seminary of the principal town. The ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... like a vessel without a pilot or a rudder. Nothing perhaps increases by indulgence more than a desultory habit of reading, especially under such opportunities of gratifying it. I believe one reason why such numerous instances of erudition occur among the lower ranks is, that, with the same powers of mind, the poor student is limited to a narrow circle for indulging his passion for books, and must necessarily make himself master of the few he possesses ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the German universities have been regarded as the seats of patient, persevering, indefatigable, but also unprofitable, erudition. They have been the homes of men whose lives were one long day of toil—a continual course of labour, the sole reward of which was a secret consciousness of worth, and a fame, circumscribed it is true, yet still spreading wide amongst the elect of science in all civilised ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... smallest idea of what Home Rule really means. They are quite incapable of understanding a complicated measure of any kind, and they naturally accept the guidance of their spiritual advisers, whom they are accustomed to regard as men of immense erudition, besides being gifted with power to bind and loose, and having the keys of heaven at command. You know how they canvass their penitents in the confessional, and how from the altar they have taught the people to lie, telling them to vote for one man and to shout ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... Time. It receives a character the most opposite to its own. From being the most generally understood and perceived, it becomes of all writing the most difficult and the most obscure. Satires, whose meaning was open to the multitude, defy the erudition of the scholar, and comedies, of which every line was felt as soon as it was spoken, require the labor of an antiquary to explain them."] whose lightness and vivacity give it the appearance of proceeding rather from the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... where she had sat nearly speechless for an hour and a half while half a dozen young ladies had discussed the origin of evil with great volubility, and what seemed to her, however it might have impressed metaphysicians, astounding erudition and profundity. She had assisted at that sacred rite of musical devotees, the Saturday night Symphony concert, where a handful of people gathered to hear the music, and all the rest of the world crowded for the sake of having been there. She had been taken ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... as in England and Germany, the romantic revival promoted and accompanied works of erudition like Raynouard's researches in Provencal and old French philology and the poetry of the troubadours (1816); Creuze de Lesser's "Chevaliers de la Table Ronde"; Marchangy's "La Gaule Poetique." History took new impulse from that sens du passe ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the reverend author criticises the customs and dispositions of the natives of Filipinas, some years ago. But I read it as I am wont to read other letters, for diversion and amusement, without thinking much about its artfulness, and I was delighted with its erudition. However, when I afterward considered its contents with some degree of thought, I saw that it brought forward, in its whole length, no solid proof of what it tries to make one believe; and it appeared to me a hyperbolical criticism from the very beginning. On that account ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... herself at once and begs Heiling to visit a public festival with her. But Heiling by nature serious and almost taciturn, refuses her request. Anna pouts, but she soon forgets her grief, when she sees the curious signs of erudition in her lover's room. Looking over the magic book, the leaves begin to turn by themselves, quicker and quicker, the strange signs seem to grow, to threaten her, until stricken with horrible fear Anna cries out, and Heiling, turning to her, sees too late what she has done. Angry at her curiosity, ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... themselves by pretending to study and understand human minds and motives could have sat in Mac's brain that night, have thought his thoughts and heard his speech, while remaining ignorant of our history and mission. Mac's mind was a storehouse of erudition, his memory a picture gallery, whose chambers were gilded and decorated with many a glowing canvas. As a child he was familiar with the Bible, the Old Testament particularly, and, improbable as it seems, was still a diligent student of Holy Writ. His mind was completely saturated ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... whose diploma's within reach, Eighty-four. On Commencement Day you'll hear my maiden-speech; I will soar! I got through without condition; I'm a mass of erudition; Do you know ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... Great Britain and Ireland, by James Macpherson, Esq., London 1773, in 4to., third edit. Dr. Macpherson was a minister in the Isle of Sky: and it is a circumstance honorable for the present age, that a work, replete with erudition and criticism, should have been composed in the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... a magician. With that idea, when I left the house of the ridiculous antiquarian, I proceeded to the public library, where, with the assistance of a dictionary, I wrote the following specimen of facetious erudition: ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... seems ignorant that there is a question. And hence my readers will in no way be astonished to learn that his information is obtained at second-hand, or that his one authority is Franck. This fact is the key to his entire work, and the sole credit that is due to him is the skilful appearance of erudition which he has given to a shallow performance, and the natural mental elegance which has prevented him from ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... been already mentioned—and so great was the popularity attained by his Commentaries, that they have been translated into no fewer than six languages within ten years. It exhibits a favorable aspect of the author's mind, and gives a very high idea of his erudition. One cause which tended greatly to its universal acceptability, was its singular freedom from sectarian bitterness. Protestants as well as Romanists may use it with equal satisfaction; and accordingly, it is considered a work of standard authority in ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... a trifle sadly of the home which he had left back there among the Maine hills, and which must have seemed a very long way off; or perhaps he was dwelling in awe upon the erudition of that excellent Greek gentleman, Mr. Xenophon, whose acquaintance, by means of the Anabasis, he was just making; or perhaps he was thinking of no more serious a subject than football and the intricate art of punting. ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... sometimes went along the narrow sidewalk of the Corso, "for an hour or so among the people, just on the edges of the fun." Sumner invited Mrs. Hawthorne to take a stroll and see pictures with him, from which she returned delighted with his criticisms and erudition. ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... favourably known to the learned world by her excellent collection of 'Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies,' has executed her task with great skill and fidelity. Every page displays careful research and accuracy. There is a graceful combination of sound, historical erudition, with an air of romance and adventure that is highly pleasing, and renders the work at once an agreeable companion of the boudoir, and a valuable addition to the historical library. Mrs. Green has entered upon an untrodden path, and gives to her biographies an air of freshness and novelty ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... not every undeserving American who can have the erudition and divination of the Genius Loci in answer to his unuttered prayer during a visit to even a small part of the Roman Forum. But failing the company of the Commendatore Boni, which is without price, there are to be had for a very little money the guidance and philosophy, and, ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... books will give them undying fame, men who have devoted a lifetime to research and the accumulation of knowledge; yet the author of the last novel, "My Mule from New Jersey," will, for the day, have more vogue among the people than any of these. But such is fame, at least in America, where erudition is not appreciated as it ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... knowledge was vast and various, and his style, tempered by foreign travel, was classical. He had mastered history, politics, law, jurisprudence, moral science, and almost every other branch of knowledge, which enabled him to display an erudition as marvelous in amount as it was varied ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... distinction of this art-dualism is kept in mind. It is morally certain that the higher part is founded, as Sturt suggests, on something that has to do with those kinds of unselfish human interests which we call knowledge and morality—knowledge, not in the sense of erudition, but as a kind of creation or creative truth. This allows us to assume that the higher and more important value of this dualism is composed of what may be called reality, quality, spirit, or substance against the lower value of form, quantity, or manner. Of these terms "substance" seems to us ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... including, in fact, every known author on every one of a wide circle of subjects. This was characteristic of the man: he was a voracious reader himself, and an example to show, in opposition to Hobbes, that original genius is not necessarily quenched by great or even excessive erudition. As bearing on the art of study, especially for striplings under twenty, Milton's scheme is open to two criticisms: first, that the amount of reading on the whole is too great; second, that in subjects handled by several authors of repute, one ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... His taste is said to have been of a purity almost perfect, combining what are seldom seen together, that critical judgment which is alive to the errors of genius, with the warm sensibility that deeply feels its beauties. At the same period, the distinguished scholar, Dr. Parr, who, to the massy erudition of a former age, joined all the free and enlightened intelligence of the present, was one of the under masters of the school; and both he and Dr. Sumner endeavored, by every method they could devise, to awaken in Sheridan a consciousness of those powers which, under all the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... and then talked about other kinds of faience, the Hispano-Arabian, the Dutch, the English, and the Italian, and having dazzled them with his erudition: ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... and the gift of comprehension peculiar to him enabled him to rapidly shape what he heard into a distinctly outlined picture. Therefore he must have seemed to laymen a very compendium of science, yet he never used this faculty to dazzle others or give himself the appearance of erudition. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... investigator. Professor Charles Richet of the University of Paris spoke of him in the highest terms, and regarded him as "an exceptionally careful and cautious investigator." His book, Mental Suggestion, which was published early in the eighties, is considered an authority, and his general erudition and scientific attainments no one could question. For many years he was professor in the ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... little misgivings as to the solid benefit to be derived from such fantastic erudition, and timidly ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
